Sometimes what makes an exam tough is not just the questions on the paper but
how many other students you are competing against.
The exam that Chinese students take to gain entrance into university was last year sat
by over 10 million students. That exam is known as the gaokao and it's a huge deal.
Students spend years preparing for the exam, often with very intense study schedules and hours of
extra coaching outside of school. The exam is sat once per year in june and that day is taken
very seriously. Traffic is diverted away from exam halls and police patrol to keep the streets quiet.
There are ambulances waiting outside just in case of a nervous collapse. Parents will
gather to pick up their children afterwards with flowers to celebrate the fact that it's over.
It is such high stakes because the exam will give students a three-digit number
which will often be the sole determinant of their acceptance into university.
The prestigious tier one universities are highly sought after as they may offer greater employment
opportunities once graduated but their acceptance rate may be as low as 1 in 50 000 students.
For many students doing well on the gaokao may be a ticket to a better life.
I have a copy of the 2020 exam here and i'll go through a few of the
questions just to show you what it is like. The exam consists of compulsory sections
on Chinese, math and a foreign language often english and electives from physics, chemistry,
biology or history, geography or politics, and it takes nine hours over a couple of days.
Some of the most notorious questions are the essays
and i've translated a few of them here. This one is pretty relevant and it's all about coronavirus.
They say that in the face of the outbreak they have adopted prevention and control measures,
that people are staying at home, venues are closed and there is a safe one metre
between people. They talk about the role of volunteers, medical experts, workers and teachers
and even journalists in fighting the virus. Then the question says please synthesize
the above materials and write an article with the theme of distance and connection
in the epidemic and they are to write an essay of at least 800 words on this topic.
It seems that current affairs or current politics are often essay questions
but so are some poetic and more unusual sounding ideas. This one for example was
so lovely even after passing through Google Translate that I wanted to share it with you.
People use their eyes to see others and the world but they cannot directly see themselves as
a whole. Therefore in the journey of life we need to look for all kinds of mirrors, constantly draw
self-portraits to examine ourselves and try to answer what kind of person am I? What kind of life
do I want to live? and what can I do" How to live more meaningfully? and other important issues.
The question asks you to write an essay as if you are writing a letter to freshmen who are
about to enrol in the first year of high school on this theme of being able to perceive yourself.
Challenging but a pretty interesting one.
Since this is a physics and maths channel I'll also take a look at those questions. This is
one of the 2020 math papers in Chinese even just from looking at the symbols and pictures
you might be able to tell there are quite a few word problems as well as a lot of geometry, logic,
a little bit of calculus, some complex numbers and some probability and statistics.
I google translated question 5 to see that it says
"if the circle passing the point 2,1 is tangent to the two coordinate axes
the distance from the center of the circle to the straight line 2x-y-3=0 is what?"
This is my interpretation of what that looks like. A circle that passes through the point 2,1
and for which both the axes are tangent. We want to find the distance from the center of the circle
which would be at 1,1 to this straight line and we'll take that to mean the shortest distance
which will meet the line at a perpendicular angle.
We'll want to find the equation of this line and to do that we'll use the formula y-y1=m(x-x1).
m or the gradient of this line will be the opposite reciprocal of the line that we
already know and that gradient is 2 so the gradient of our line will be -1/2.
Substituting ones for y1 and x1 will get the equation to be y=-1/2*x+3/2.
The line we already know could be rewritten as y=2x-3
so we can set these two equations equal to each other. Doing that will give us
the point where they intersect, those coordinates are x equals 9/5 and y equals 3/5.
Now we just want to find the distance between these two known points to do that we will use
the distance formula which is the square root of x2 minus x1 squared plus y2 minus y1 squared.
Putting our coordinates into there and doing a bit of rearranging. We would
find that the correct answer is B, two root five over five.
I think that the math involved here is reasonable to expect on entrance exams in a lot of countries
there are quite a few steps to this one though so it's a little tricky
but I think it's worth remembering that this exam is not so much a certification or a
test that you have learned what you've been taught at school, instead this is a ranking system.
It doesn't really matter that you know how to do all the math steps to solve this problem
and you pull it all off without making a mistake it matters that you can get through the entire
exam making as few mistakes as possible in order to rank high among the other students.
It doesn't really matter how much you know it matters how much everyone else knows as well.
Moving on to physics this is the 2020 Beijing paper and the whole thing has been google
translated. There is a bit of atomic physics on the first page, thermodynamics, waves,
some electromagnetism including number eight where they've got a picture of a small magnetic needle
hanging near a negatively charged rubber disk. The disk rotates at high speed around the central axis
and the small magnetic needle deflects. You're then asked to determine what's going on.
There's electronics, a question about molecular forces,
friction and one about the conservation of momentum and energy.
Question 14 is asking about a basketball that is dropped from a height but is given a bit of spin
and instead of falling straight down it deviates from the vertical and moves in a curve.
The second part of this physics exam seems to be more about some experimental techniques.
There are some classic questions about experimental design and following the scientific
method. The first section was multi-choice but this section requires written answers.
There are 20 questions in here but a lot of them have multiple parts and some are pretty lengthy,
for this physics paper I've shown you would get 90 minutes so it is still a race against the clock.
In conclusion as one would expect this is a difficult exam
but I don't think that learning the content matter is really that far out of reach for most students,
in fact it is really dealing with the insane competitiveness that comes with trying to get all
these points without making mistakes because even a tiny mistake could see your ranking plummet.
Best wishes for anyone who is perhaps preparing for this exam or an exam like it
coming up in 2021, one day I hope you too will be able to look at exams just for fun.
I do have a whole series looking at exams across the world so check out some of those
videos in the playlist at the end. Thanks as always to my Patreon supporters for making
these videos possible including a special shout out to today's Patron cats of the day
Strega and Luna. Thanks for watching and I hope to see you next time.